Can AI Rescue Recycling?

livemint.com:

Recyclers across the U.S. are struggling, hurt by a shortage of workers and rising costs that too often make recycling uneconomic. They are hoping artificial intelligence can help turn things around and boost recycling rates.

Recycling of municipal solid waste declined from nearly 35% in 2015 to around 32% in 2018, according to the latest figures from the Environmental Protection Agency. How can AI help? By doing the sorting work in recycling facilities that a dwindling number of people want to do—and doing it better. AI-driven robots pick up recyclable trash at around 80 pieces a minute; people can sort around 50 to 80 pieces a minute.

Optical sorters, a more established technology that’s growing more efficient thanks to improved AI, are much faster, sorting up to 1,000 pieces a minute. Both options are being deployed by the country’s biggest recyclers, and many smaller ones, in a bid to increase the amount of material they can viably retrieve from the waste stream. Filling the labor gap It all starts with the labor issue.

Sorting sites are often only 80% staffed and sometimes as little as 20%, says Cody Marshall, chief system optimization officer at the Recycling Partnership, a nonprofit supported by beverage, food and other companies that works with recyclers to improve their operations. Staffing shortages mean they can’t operate at full capacity. “AI can fill these gaps," he says.

It is helping to do that at the Boulder County Recycling Center, one of Colorado’s biggest recyclers. The facility brought robots into its sorting plant three years ago. It has two robots with arms and suction cups sorting plastic bottles, milk cartons and other recyclable trash on a conveyor belt.